Arisen : Genesis (19 page)

And Bob made it to the truck. Though he had a little breathing room, dozens more of the already dead were lurching down and across the gully now. It was like Berbera was being emptied out. The battle on the street above continued to rage, the cracking and snapping of high-velocity rounds coming and going up and down the length of the road.

And, for Zack, it was truly a shooting war now.

He saw that Bob now had the ISU.

But Zack had been watching the wrong spot again. He only realized it when the second RPG streaked brilliantly down and to his right. It was gorgeous in the night-vision view, like a beautiful comet or Roman candle on the Fourth of July. Zack could immediately see that a handful of the militia fighters were sweeping down the slope and forward. It was the classic problem with being outnumbered: enemy sweeping around your flanks.

The rocket-propelled grenade hit, once again, only a few yards in front of Bob’s feet. Zack thought he could see him lifted up, hurled into the back of the upturned Tahoe, and dropped back down again like an enormous sack of potatoes.

He lay on the ground unmoving.

And the ranks of the dead kept on coming, unaffected.

Maximum Bob’s Last Stand

And then suddenly Bob was moving again. Though it was initially more like twitching. Zack reloaded his pistol and took very, very careful aim at the heads of the staggering figures bearing down on his friend, only just on the other side of the Tahoe from him now.

Yes, Bob was his friend – Zack realized it for the first time. Bob was fucking awesome. And now Bob was probably going to die, while trying to save the rest of them.
But not while I’ve got breath and bullets
, Zack swore, hot tears leaking at the corners of his eyes.

After he’d emptied a second magazine, he looked back to Bob. The warrior’s mouth was moving now. But Zack couldn’t hear anything. Maybe it was because of the ringing he still had in his ears. But when Dugan leapt over the crest of the hill, rifle in one hand, coil of rope in the other, Zack realized Bob hadn’t been talking to him. He’d been talking on his team radio. Dugan hit the hill shooting – he was firing at the knot of militia members sweeping down the slope. In a few seconds they were all scattered or shot, or at least going for cover.

Dugan then grabbed Zack’s good arm, and wordlessly wrapped the end of the nylon rope around it. He then gave the coil a mighty heave down the slope. It landed on Bob’s lap. Dugan then advanced two paces down the slope and started firing at the legions of the dead advancing around the Tahoe. But then both Zack and Dugan heard Baxter shouting from the road. “Dugan! A little help here…!”

Dugan stopped in his tracks. He pivoted and popped off another four rounds at the group on the slope. He mouthed a silent curse and seemed to remonstrate with himself. He glared at Zack. “Keep shooting! Cover Bob!” He pulled off his little radio earpiece and boxed it onto Zack’s ear. He then shoved his small team radio into Zack’s vest. “He’ll tell you what he needs. Shoot!”

Zack complied. The infected were so close to Bob now, he had to shoot carefully. But Bob was shooting on his own behalf now – first around one side of the Tahoe, then the other. But he was still on the ground. Zack sensed that Bob couldn’t get up. He found the transmit button on the radio. “Bob! Come on! Get out of there!” Then he spun in a dead panic as he felt a hand on his shoulder, and almost shot Baxter, who now stood behind him, chest heaving with rapid breaths and adrenaline.

“Zack!” Baxter pointed at the rope. “I’m supposed to help pull!”

Zack nodded. “Okay.” He pressed transmit again. “Bob? Are you ready? We’re gonna haul you up!”

“Yeah, go for it.”
He still sounded… jovial. Jesus.

They could hear the firing up on the road pick up. At this point, Dugan was holding off the entire militia by himself. Which was probably about the right distribution of their manpower. Zack and Baxter each grabbed two handfuls of rope and hauled hand over hand. The weight and drag were terrific. They’d reeled the rope in several feet before Zack realized… Bob wasn’t at the end of it.

The ISU was.

“Bob! What the fuck! Grab the rope!”

“Negative. Get the gear up there first. Then we’ll deal with me.”

Zack looked at Baxter, who was looking back at him saucer-eyed in the dark, pupils enormous with fear and night vision. Zack didn’t want to do it. But there was absolutely no time for arguing. The AK fire was still getting closer every second… Dugan was badly outnumbered, and could delay but not stop the assault… and the tide of the dead in the gully was swelling and advancing. Zack resumed hauling, and Baxter piled in. It
was
heavy as hell, and inched up the slope in jerks and tumbles. He had no idea how after this they were going to reel in Bob – who probably weighed 280 pounds.

Finally, several eternities later, they grabbed the ISU – and realized why it was so heavy. It had the UAV ground control station, in its hard plastic case, lanyarded to the back of it. And lanyarded to the top of
that
was… Bob’s rifle, as well as his tactical vest, with maybe a half-dozen magazines in its pouches.

“
No!
” Zack hollered. He snatched up the rifle, bracing the barrel with his bad arm in a spasm of sickening pain, and sighted down the hillside. There was Bob, sitting with his back to the truck, dead legs spread out before him, .45 in one hand and knife in the other. Dead were pouring around either side of the Tahoe, and Bob engaged them from one side and then the other. Zack could see it all play out, small but vivid in the eerie night-vision view. Bob leaned around and fired to one side, then the other, heavy reports of the .45, bodies falling – but many of them falling on him. He shoved them away, dropped an empty mag, jammed his knife into a face with bared teeth straining toward his.

Zack, in a dead panic, flipped his selector switch to full auto, moved his aim to the right, alongside the Tahoe and along the line of ravening bodies moving across it, depressed the trigger, and murdered the whole group, an entire full magazine poured into the crowd. The figures jerked, fell… and then got up again.

A hand yanked his headset off his ear. It was Dugan, pausing a half-second to seat it on his own ear. “Comin’ for you, buddy…” he said. Zack could hear the response – he wasn’t sure if it was leaking out of Dugan’s earpiece, or just bellowing up the hill. “Don’t you take a step down this hill, brother! Get the gear, and get the others out!”

Dugan blinked. “Fuck that.” He hadn’t pressed the transmit button, which was still in Zack’s vest. He was just saying it. He raised his rifle and leaned into it to take a shot. And as he did so, another RPG streaked down and across the hillside, leaving sparks and a phosphorescent trail in the dark. It hit Bob dead on, plowing into the ground at the back of the Tahoe, and at the center of the mass of frenzied dead, throwing bodies ten meters in all directions. Dugan instinctively threw his hand up over his head and turned away. When he moved to straighten up, there were strong arms gripping his torso.

It was Baxter, standing behind him.

“He’s gone, Dugan!” Zack marveled at the nerve and bravado of the twenty-three-year-old. He had come into his own in a single instant.

“
Noooo— no!
” Dugan raged against Baxter’s arms. But then he slackened. He knew it was true.

“
We gotta go!
” Baxter shouted above the roar of the AKs, as well as the fire burning down below, and the inhuman gnashing and growling sounds of the army of the dead. “
We gotta go now!
”

Dugan shook off Baxter’s grip, turned aside, and drew his knife, that evil six-inch fixed commando blade, with a single motion. Zack staggered backward, away from him. Dugan sliced through the lanyards around the ISU, handed the GCS to Baxter, the magazine-stuffed vest to Zack, and hefted the ISU itself under his left arm. “Go!” he said. Zack and Baxter complied, putting their heads down and sprinting up the hill and toward the bridge, the sound of heavy 5.56 fire following right behind them – and heavier 7.62 rounds cracking all around them and plunking into the steel and glass of the vehicles ahead.

Dugan was running and firing almost blindly from the hip.

Covering them as they all got the hell out of Dodge.

Or almost all of them.

Mountains of the Moon

After surviving all of that, they almost got hung up and taken out in Berbera, which lay across the bridge and over the hill.

As bad as Hargeisa had been, Berbera was worse – a ninth-circle-of-hell miasma of burning buildings, smoke-choked air, dead-thronged streets, heaving black darkness, and half-gnawed bodies in view on seemingly every square meter of ground. It was like the devil finally got free rein to do to this place in earnest what he had been doing in jest for decades. He finally got to fulfill his most erotic fantasy of seeing East Africa
literally
consume itself.

Worse, none of the three survivors in the scavenged U.N. Land Cruiser knew their way around this particular shithole. They had to enter the city proper due to the now-familiar problem of intercity road entrances and interchanges being impassable parking lots. Zack called out turns from the moving map GPS on his phone, making constant corrections and adjustments when street after street proved impassable.

By the time they found the coast road, leading east alongside the Gulf of Aden and toward Djibouti, Zack had given them up for dead at least five times. In the end, it was Dugan’s flawless and inspired driving, Baxter’s continuously improving shooting, and Zack’s flickering resolve not to let Maximum Bob’s sacrifice be for nothing, that saw them through.

That and a great heaping shit-ton of luck.

When they made it out alive, the coastal road was a great improvement. The terrain was flat, sandy, and surrounded by desert. This meant any stopped or crashed vehicles, or outbreak victims, could easily be spotted and driven around. Zack wondered idly if this was what a world hit by a gamma ray burst would look like… a bleak wasteland, populated only by the dying and the dead.

Certainly Berbera, that horror show of panic and contagion and man’s profound inhumanity to man, was exactly what he’d imagined a bioengineered viral apocalypse would look like. Maybe, when they got to Lemonnier, they’d finally find out whether this was just East Africa in flames again… or the whole world burning.

For now, the dying AND the dead were at least less of a threat when you could see them a mile away.

On the downside, Zack realized with a spasm of slapped-forehead self-loathing that he’d never charged his phone – and the goddamned charger was back in the Tahoe, at the bottom of that gully, with the spirit of Maximum Bob standing guard over it, forever. He turned the device off, to save the remaining battery for some occasion when they couldn’t do without it. Such an occasion was sure to come – and no doubt before they found another compatible charger, which could well be never.

The interior of the Land Cruiser wasn’t radically different from the Tahoe. More headroom. Baxter still rode in the back, so he could shoot out either back window. Zack had Bob’s station now, riding shotgun. After they were out of Berbera, he also turned off his NVGs, to save that battery as well. Now the slightly moon-washed desertscape spread around him flatly in every direction. He could see enough to feel like they were on some other planet.

“What’s the
P
factor?” Baxter asked quietly from the back seat, breaking a long silence.

“Huh?” Dugan looked like he hadn’t heard him.

“The
P
factor. Bob said you had to crank it up.”

“Oh.” Dugan’s throat bobbed as he swallowed dryly. “P is for ‘plenty.’ He meant I should be slinging a lot more brass downrange toward the militia.”

“Got it.”

Dugan seemed to marshal his thoughts – as if he were trying to master himself for the others’ sake. “You did well back there,” he said finally, looking up at Baxter in the rear-view. “But you can’t be tentative. It’s all about throttle control. You’ve got to be smooth and keep the lid on – until the time is right, then you dial the violence up all the way. Instantly. You don’t hesitate. You understand?”

“Check.”

Zack listened to the veteran warrior instructing the younger man. Zack guessed maybe it was a way for Dugan to feel like he had some control over his situation.

Dugan said, “You qualified on the M4 at the Farm, right?”

“Yes,” Baxter said. “And the MP5, MP7, and a few handguns.”

“You shoot well. The fundamentals are there. You just need more confidence. Remember: throttle control. Dial it up fast.”

“Okay, Dugan. Check.”

The SEAL’s visage seemed to cloud over again, and he spoke more quietly. “In a firefight you don’t have the luxury of coming up with a great plan…” He seemed now to be talking more to himself than to Baxter. “A decent plan executed now is better than a great plan executed five minutes from now, when you’re all dead…”

And with that, Dugan resumed driving in fragile silence.

Zack stole a glance over at the now-lone warrior. He looked like he was grinding his jaw. Like he was going over things again and again in his head. And in what seemed like a rare episode of genuine telepathy, Zack felt he knew exactly what was running through Dugan’s mental monologue: “
whatever exodus was heading down this road is over. And we’ll be gone in a few minutes. It’ll be fine…
” It had been Dugan’s call to leave the Tahoe on the road. And that, via a chain of terrible events, had led directly to Bob’s death. In retrospect, it was obviously a crap call.

But everything’s obvious in retrospect.

What had really killed Bob was the same thing that had brought that truck screaming out of nowhere, and out of control, onto them: bad luck. Bob had fallen to bad luck. And to his own selflessness. He had made a choice.

To save the others.

Zack personally knew two separate stories of SEALs falling on grenades to save their brothers – at the cost of their own lives. That was just how it was for them. And probably what gave their lives meaning to them.